The Meaning of Bitcoin

A more complete answer here: https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/the-politics-...

"I've seen people get rich off crypto" and I've seen hundreds of gambling addicts lose their house and put their family on the street when the bet didn't go right. Even when you're talking about serious coins, ignoring the rug pulls. That money comes from somewhere. Who's holding the bag?

Crypto people tend to have an infinite dose of "f** you got mine" even if they didn't get theirs.

The author describes precisely my reason for being interested in Bitcoin.

Things which other people seem to readily accept, such as ATM's having limits, the nature of card payments being inherently asymmetric, the middlemen, "know your customer", etc.

All of that stuff just seems insane to me. It's as if someone were standing at my door, telling me that I can't take more than seven items out of my house per day, asking me why I'm moving furniture around, etc.

If you're happy with that stuff, great, stick with it. I'm not.

It is not and never was about "getting rich". That's the side effect of the utility of the system.

Yep, for every person who gains a dollar someone had to lose a dollar. No value was created. In this way crypto is actually a less than zero sum game since some money is always lost to the machine through sending to abandoned wallets, lost private keys, etc. So on average everyone loses.

Hmm.. the government effectively owns the network, the land, and the police force. The idea that the government cannot stop a monetary transaction is woefully naive; the only reason they haven't in the case of BTC is that it isnt money. If it came anywhere close to rivalling a state-backed currency, you'd be undermining the monetary and financial ability of a democratically elected government to exercise its economic policies. You'd be thrown in prison.

Aside from the obvious ease with which a government can undermine the network, it's participants, and so on -- there is also the lack of incentive for anyone not ideologically committed to interpreting a blockchain as currency, to do so.

A database, of any type, is just a set of numbers. The meaning of those numbers is a social and institutional practice. Contracts enforcing that meaning is a legal and political one.

This article displays the same extraordinary naivety of tech libertarians that I'd assumed had now past. Money is a social institution. Social institutions will not be replaced by anyone's preferred system of rules.

This is a common flaw in all utopian thinking, that necessarily and forever, all people will have more incentive to listen to them and follow their rules, than to ignore them or kill them. There is no evidence for the former, and daily mountains of evidence of the latter.

The final incentive to accept the dollar is the threat to your life, and all people you'd conspire with, to undermine it. This is the only known solution to forming stable contracts and society-wide reliable institutions.